Agunot in an Age of Total War

Of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish men mobilized into the various European armies during World War One, tens of thousands perished. Their untimely deaths spelled protracted tragedy for the wives and families that they left behind. In particular, tens of thousands of young Jewish women throughout Europe became agunot in need of rabbinic permission to remarry. Although the number of agunot in Eastern Europe had increased dramatically following the onset of the Great Migration to America, it was World War One that turned their plight into a mass phenomenon. Starting after the first battles in 1914 and lasting nearly throughout the interwar period, East European agunot published announcements in Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers in search of information that the rabbis needed to permit them to remarry.

This paper will focus not on those announcements but rather on the rabbinic responsa that reveal the process through which poskim attempted to free agunot. These responsa serve as valuable sources that reveal the ways in which these rabbis applied the laws regarding freeing agunot to the unprecedented reality of total war. In particular, I will focus on how responsa sought to deal leniently with the following novel aspects of testimony and evidence regarding the missing husbands: death notices of soldiers issued by combatant governments; identification of the bodies of soldiers through identity tags; the expansion of acceptance of testimony from non-Jewish soldiers about the death of husbands in war; and the allowance of testimony from non-observant Jews.

It is impossible to know the exact numbers or percentage of World War One agunot who received rabbinic permission to remarry. However, the responsa reveal the extent to which the poskim were willing to expand the pool of testimony needed to release these women by accepting both new types of evidence that emerged from a state of total war and more traditional types that stemmed from previously disqualified witnesses such as non-observant Jews.